Check Point Memory consumption – Out of Memory

If you issue the top or free command, you may be spooked and lead to believe you are out of memory and you start digging about checking the processes memory usage without getting any wiser. The reason being you and Linux using different terminology with regards to free memory, which I will try to explain this in this post.

Disk Cache borrows memory
What we are looking at here is the OS “claiming” you are out of memory and Check Point claims you are not.
And the reason people thinks their systems is out of memory is because any available memory is borrowed by Linux for Disk cache and moved from the free-pool to the cached-pool.
This enables applications to access frequently used files directly from RAM rather than reading from disk, improving performance accordingly.
In our example this means 4122MB of the memory is used for disk cache.

If an application requries more memory than available in the free-pool, it will simply take back the memory from the cached-pool.